DMT is a multi-carrier technique standardised and well known for a man skilled in the art used for high bit-rate data transmission on twisted-pair lines, such as subscriber loops for telephony.
In U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,523 describes a method of demultiplexing OFDM signals and a receiver for such signals. More particularly the method is concerned with synchronization in an OFDM receiver. A signal is read into a synchronization unit, in the time domain, i.e., before fourier transforming the signal by means of an FFT processor. In the synchronization unit, a frame clock is derived for triggering the start of the FFT process and for controlling the rate at which data is supplied to the FFT processor. For OFDM reception, it is vital that the FFT process commences at the right point in time. Once the frame clock has been recovered, a frequency error can be estimated by the synchronization unit The frequency error is used to control; an oscillator which generates a complex rotating vector which is, in turn, multiplied with the signal to compensate for frequency errors. The method can be used both with OFDM systems in which symbols are separated by guard spaces, and with OFDM systems in which symbols are pulse shaped. Our invention have put in to practice a new method which is partly based on this earlier known method.
One problem that is always present is the signal cross-talk between pairs located in the same cable bundle. The cross-talk is usually described as two components, NEXT and FEXT. NEXT (Near End X-Talk) is the interference from other transmitters in the same end as the receiver. FEXT (Far End X-Talk) is the interference from other transmitters in the opposite end of the line.
DMT is a digital transmission technology relying on the orthogonality between carriers. The up-stream and down-stream transmission is done on separate sets of carriers. Thus, NEXT is associated with transmission in the opposite direction and FEXT with transmission in the same direction as the received data. NEXT is usually the strongest interference signal, since it is generated close to a receiver that is receiving a weak signal.
The orthogonality is the best means to reduce the influence of NEXT. As long as the DMT frames are aligned to the same frame timing, the orthogonality holds and adjacent carriers can be used for different transmission directions without any capacity loss due to NEXT. This synchronisation has been posed as a problem for operators to implement, especially in an “unbundled” environment, where different operators share the same cable bundles.